Cloud Customer Architecture for eCommerce

Cloud Customer Architecture for e-Commerce

Executive Overview

This architecture is a vendor neutral and best practices approach to describe the flows and relationships between business capabilities and architectural components for e-Commerce applications that use cloud computing infrastructure, platforms and/or services. The elements of this architecture are used to instantiate an e-Commerce system whether using private, public or hybrid cloud deployment models. Applications comprising the core components of the architecture may be delivered as a service, from on-premises or hosted.

This e-Commerce architecture explains how to support enhanced customer engagement as well as supplier and partner engagements. The customer engagement core components of Marketing, Customer Analytics and e-Commerce architecture enables enriched engagement with customers on a deeper, human level and allows them to be delighted with the right experience at the perfect moment to build lasting loyalty. The supplier and partner engagement core components of Payments, Procurement and B2BIntegration enables enhanced supplier and partner engagements that move beyond responsiveness to a synchronized, predictive value chain that mitigates risk and reveals hidden value on a global scale.

The interfaces or dependencies between these and other systems are important considerations when designing the final system architecture. In many cases some of these core systems may remain onpremises, such as Warehouse Management or Point of Sale. One of the most important decisions to make when planning the e-Commerce system is deciding if on-premises components are candidates for deployment in an off-premises cloud service. Resilience and elasticity are among the considerations discussed when evaluating on-premises and "as a service" components. The intent of the evaluation is to ensure that a secure, reliable, high performance architecture is present across the e-Commerce solution. To ensure completeness a number of other components are required, such as firewalls, load balancers, databases, file repositories, content delivery networks, email and messaging.

The architecture described in this paper shows many system components that exist in a provider cloud environment. Yet it is important to understand that it is possible for some of these components to exist on-premises in the enterprise network and not in a cloud environment, particularly where there is an existing component in place which provides the required capabilities. Other considerations to make when evaluating as a service offerings, particularly for Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), are the skillsets and number of personnel needed for ongoing operations and management of the component, as well as the capital expense of standing up hardware.

For the scenario where the cloud service is a PaaS offering, it is often the case that many elements of the architecture are available as part of the platform and only configuration and deployment is required. When a SaaS solution is selected the responsibilities for management are frequently reduced to configuration and user management.

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The cloud deployment model affects the locations of many of the components in an e-Commerce architecture. In particular, for SaaS and public cloud deployment, the elements are instantiated in the public cloud. For private cloud deployment, the components are instantiated within the private cloud, either on-premises or within a privately managed environment made available by a cloud service provider. The likelihood that the final cloud architecture will be a hybrid IT design is high. For hybrid cloud architectures, the choice of where to locate each component, either in a public or dedicated external cloud environment or an on-premises private cloud service, is governed by security, compliance and performance considerations. The Cloud Deployment Considerations section describes options in more depth. Links to other CSCC resources are included at the end of the paper.

Holistic understanding of e-Commerce architectures is based on understanding the architectures for the mobile, web application hosting, big data and analytics and IoT capabilities that it composes. An appreciation of service provider SLAs is also helpful. Please refer to the CSCC's Cloud Customer Reference Architecture papers for Web Application Hosting, Mobile, Big Data and Analytics, and IoT [1] [2] [3] [4] for a thorough discussion and best practices on each specific topic.

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Cloud Customer Reference Architecture for e-Commerce

Figure 1 shows the elements that may be needed for any e-Commerce solution across three domains: public networks, provider clouds, and enterprise networks.

Figure 1: Elements of e-Commerce Solution

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The public network domain contains commerce users and their e-Commerce channel for interaction with the enterprise. The public network also includes communication with peer clouds. The edge services handle traffic between the pubic network and the cloud. The provider cloud can host comprehensive e-Commerce capabilities-- such as merchandising, location awareness, B2B2C commerce, payment processing, customer care, distributed order management, supply chain management and warehouse management. Marketing takes advantage of commerce analytics which helps with digital, cross channel, social and sentiment analytics. Using data cloud services, such as weather analytics, can help in adjusting the merchandise inventory and optimizing transportation in the provider cloud. Data services can be used to generate and aggregate insight reports from the other data cloud services, enterprise data and applications via business performance components in the provider cloud. These insights are used by users and enterprise applications and can also be used to trigger actions to be performed in the e-Commerce environment. All of this needs to be done in a secure and governed environment.

The enterprise network domain contains existing enterprise systems including enterprise applications, enterprise data stores and the enterprise user directory. Results are delivered to users and applications using transformation and connectivity components that provide secure messaging and translations to and from systems of engagement, enterprise data, and enterprise applications.

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Figure 2 shows the relationships for supporting e-Commerce using cloud computing.

Figure 2: Cloud Component Relationships for e-Commerce

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Components

Public network components

The public network contains elements that exist in the Internet: data sources and APIs, users, and the edge services needed to access the provider cloud or enterprise network.

e-Commerce User An e-Commerce User is a customer who uses various channels to access the commerce solutions on the cloud provider platform or enterprise network.

Channel Channel retailing solutions aim to provide a seamless, personalized brand experience whether the customer shops on the Web, over the phone, using a mobile device or all of the above. Not only can you create a next-generation Web channel, you can leverage the Web to improve revenues and customer service in all channels.

Key capabilities in this domain include:

? Web Site: Capabilities necessary for a direct to consumer online store. Web storefronts enhance the shopping experience with rich capabilities-- from advanced faceted search and mini shopping carts, to integrated inventory availability and product comparisons. See the Cloud Customer Web Application Hosting Reference Architecture for more information. [1]

? Mobile: Supports commerce storefronts that take full advantage of mobile device browsers, touchscreens, and location based information to deliver an optimized and highly personalized mobile shopping experience. See the Cloud Customer Mobile Reference Architecture for more information. [2]

? Connected Devices: Provides the ability to have connected devices place orders for depleted products helping retailers drive an alternate channel of sales where connected devices are making buying decisions when needed. This option provides convenience to the customer and low touch sales to the retailer.

Edge Services Services needed to allow data to flow safely from the internet into the provider cloud and into the enterprise. Edge services also support end user applications.

Key capabilities in this domain include:

? Domain Name System Server: Resolves the URL for a particular web resource to the TCP-IP address of the system or service that can deliver that resource.

? Content Delivery Networks (CDN): Supports end user applications by providing geographically distributed systems of servers deployed to minimize the response time for serving resources to geographically distributed users, ensuring that content is highly available and provided to users with minimum latency. Which servers are engaged will depend on server proximity to the user, and where the content is stored or cached.

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? Firewall: Controls communication access to or from a system permitting only traffic meeting a set of policies to proceed and blocking any traffic that does not meet the policies. Firewalls can be implemented as separate dedicated hardware, or as a component in other networking hardware such as a load-balancer or router or as integral software to an operating system.

? Load Balancers: Provides distribution of network or application traffic across many resources (such as computers, processors, storage, or network links) to maximize throughput, minimize response time, increase capacity and increase reliability of applications. Load balancers can balance loads locally and globally. Load balancers should be highly available without a single point of failure. Load balancers are sometimes integrated as part of the provider cloud analytical system components like stream processing, data integration, and repositories.

Cloud Provider Components

e-Commerce Applications With the advent of social and mobile platforms and technologies, suppliers and retailers have started to collaborate in new ways providing capabilities to the end customer that were not possible just a few years ago. Having a retailer participate as a delivery channel for a supplier has not only provided convenience to customers by allowing direct ordering from a manufacturer, it has extended the supplier's ability to tap into new markets and channels. For the retailer, in addition to providing convenience, it has allowed them to reach new customers and promote their brand.

Key capabilities in this domain include:

? Mobile Digital & Store: Enables the convergence of physical and digital stores to provide new ways of reaching and satisfying customer requirements for shopping, delivery and personalization.

? Product Search and Personalization: Enables customers to find products more effectively. A multi-channel search solution also supports keyword search, type-ahead and search suggestions. It also extends the scope of searchable content for business users for both structured and unstructured content. The search is based around the search index which must be built before it can be used for any searches. Site administrators and business users can work with search to fine-tune search merchandising to display preferred products to shoppers. Once a set of qualified products are found, further product selection and/or display order of products can be personalized based on customer and product attributes. Personalization decision rules and scores can be applied by real time analytical engines (see Marketing and Commerce Analytics).

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? Catalog: Provides a consistent view of items offered by a retailer and allows a customer to search or place an order using a mobile device, application or other IoT connected channel. The catalog offered to customers can be controlled by sales offerings, contracts or many additional rules of entitlement including customer behavior and transactional insights. The catalog offering is driven by merchants and for B2B sites, is additionally driven by individual contracts with participating external B2B entities. Catalog can include the capability to provide correct prices for the product and services offered in the catalog. The pricing and promotions functions include calculations based on product, quantities, combinations or contents of the shopping cart and, in B2B sites, contracts. In a B2B commerce scenario, it is very common to have pricing and promotions being driven off a contract with the external B2B entity participating in commerce. Catalog, pricing and promotions can also be considered a common enterprise service that enables catalog, price and promotion calculations across all participating commerce channels within the enterprise. In cases where common services are not feasible, federation of catalog, pricing and promotion data from merchandizing applications or enterprise systems to individual systems can be used.

? Order Capture: Enables the creation of shopping carts, wish lists for future purchases, shipping information, payment information, and the conversion of shopping cart to an order. Order capture also allows orders started on a mobile device to be completed in a physical store or on a web application. It also provides the capabilities of bulk order placements - orders placed from a marketplace. Integration and update of the captured order information into the customer's existing distributed order management processes and components is supported. It also provides order information to customer's order inquiries and integrates with customer care for providing updates on the status of the order using customer preferences. It provides the customer service rep with functionality for assisted order capture and placements.

? Marketplace: Allows customers to shop across multiple sellers. The marketplaces are analogous to physical malls which provide customers multiple shopping experiences in one convenient location. The online marketplaces typically own customer data and control the shopping experience across the sellers within the marketplace. The marketplace drives the marketing, catalog, product placements, cart management, checkout services, payment handling, order brokering and orchestration and after sales customer services. The customers place the order within the marketplace, and the marketplace brokers the orders to individual sellers selling the product. Orders can include product from multiple sellers. In many cases, the marketplace can also provide fulfillment services that can help provide a consistent fulfillment experience for the end customer.

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